Starr Says He Got `Bum Rap'

Ex-prosecutor Campaigns To Show He Was Honorable

December 05, 1999|By Neil A. Lewis, New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — Kenneth Starr, who spent five years investigating criminal allegations against President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, said Friday that Clinton "has yet to come to terms with his own responsibility" in trying to "play games with the law."

In a breakfast meeting with reporters, Starr said the notion he had been too zealous in pursuing the Clintons is "a totally bogus and bum rap."

Starr has been engaged in a round of carefully selected public appearances since his October resignation as independent counsel for Whitewater matters as part of a concerted effort to give his side of the epic battle with the Clintons. In appearances like those on NBC's "Meet the Press," CNN's "Larry King Live," a speech before a Virginia bar group and in a tour of several newspaper editorial boards, Starr has pressed a consistent version of events:

He was engaged in straightforward and difficult investigation that was conducted honorably but that he had been widely misunderstood because he was overmatched by a slick White House public relations operation.

On Friday, he said that while he was content with the fact that the Senate voted to acquit Clinton on impeachment charges, he is dismayed that he hears people saying and believing "it's OK to commit perjury and obstruction of justice if the arena of the conduct is personal." He said such a view was "a lawless perspective."

He said it was also insufficient for the president to acknowledge failures only in his personal and private behavior. Clinton "should get himself right with the law," he said. History would be kinder to the president if "he had a significant show of acceptance of his responsibility," the ex-prosecutor added.

Although Starr did not specify exactly what that meant, it would almost certainly include acknowledging participating in efforts to commit perjury and obstruct justice, the two main offenses of which he was accused in Starr's September 1998 report to Congress that set off the impeachment proceedings.

He said Clinton should make some sort of a public admission. "I would like the president to simply come to terms with what he did," Starr said, although he expressed doubt that the president would do so.

Starr accused Clinton, in essence, of lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky when questioned about it in a deposition in a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones. Jones had charged that when Clinton was governor of Arkansas and she was a state clerical employee, he crudely propositioned her.

Starr also charged that Clinton later lied to a federal grand jury about whether he had been truthful in the Jones deposition.

The former independent counsel said Friday that Clinton should have settled the Jones lawsuit early. "You can write a check" to settle such things, he said. "But don't play games with the law."

While acknowledging that he might have been misleading about his relationship with Lewinsky, a onetime White House intern, and apologizing to the country, Clinton has insisted that he broke no laws.

On his own performance, Starr offered a measure of self-criticism but largely tempered it by portraying himself as someone who was bested, even overwhelmed, by White House "spin machine," an expression he used repeatedly. He also said that his opponents succeeded in turning the Lewinsky part of the investigation into "part of the culture wars."

In rebutting the idea that he may have been too zealous, he recalled the criticism he endured when he called Marsha Lewis, Lewinsky's mother, before the grand jury.

"Does a prosecutor subpoena a loved one, a mother?" he asked. "Yes, you do. That's what prosecutors do."

He added that when he realized how distraught Lewis was, he then arranged to take her testimony in private.